The Mascot

by Mark Kurzem

  I remained in Melbourne for another fortnight. My father went about his business, spending more and more of the day tinkering in his workshop, and, I suspect, deliberately avoiding me. In a way I was relieved. Already overwhelmed by what I had learned about my father’s childhood, I was struggling to come to terms with it.

  When I woke early one morning feeling unwell, I made a decision: rather than remain in Melbourne any longer, growing impatient with my father, I would head to Tokyo as soon as possible to begin my research. My departure might give my father the time and space he clearly needed to talk to the family.

  Three days later my father backed the car out of the driveway on the start of our journey to the airport. From the backseat I kept my eye out for traffic. At one end of our street, I caught sight of the oil refinery. As it came into view this time any nostalgic sentiments evaporated. The corporate signs affixed to the refinery fence were those of powerful German industrial conglomerates. Though these signs had been there all my life, I now began to see them in an entirely new light: Germany, with one of its most forbidding emblems—the belching chimney—surrounded our neighborhood.

  This was how I had grown up—with the inextinguishable German flame at one end of the street and a slaughterhouse owned, as it happened to be, by a Jewish family at the other. I’d never given much thought to either, but now there seemed to have been a coded message buried in the landscape of my childhood that I had failed to detect.

  The flight to Tokyo went smoothly enough, punctuated only by mild turbulence. The same could not be said of my mood. While I felt a deepened sense of companionship with my father, there was also an odd sense of foreboding. I felt dislocated, cast adrift to face an open, possibly hostile sea.

  The heat and humidity of Tokyo in the summer was so stifling that it was always a relief to get back to my manshon, as the Japanese called the tiny studios in downtown Tokyo. It was a lighthearted linguistic play on the English word “mansion,” since most of them, mine included, were no more than three hundred square feet. Yet as I opened the front door a wall of heat hit me. The room was suffocating, like an oven or a sauna. Before I had even closed the door behind me, it and the windowpanes began to rattle, almost imperceptibly at first. I held my breath, waiting to see if the gentle shaking developed into an earth tremor, turning mere inconvenience into real danger. My manshon and my nerves continued to rattle, until abruptly, with one slight jolt, the room settled. I switched on the air conditioner and waited for it to kick in.

  There was a loud knock on my door. For an instant I thought it was my father.

  “Moshi moshi, yubin desu!” a voice called out. It was the postman with a special delivery.

  The book-sized package he handed me bore few details on its exterior, apart from a customs declaration and my address inscribed in my father’s unusually thick black lettering, as if this would somehow guarantee its delivery. I tore off the outer wrapping and found an unlabeled videocassette encased in Bubble Wrap.

  I headed back across the darkened room, slipped the cassette into the VCR, and pushed Play. After several moments the screen came to life: a head-and-shoulders close-up of my father suddenly appeared. Below his image, as if imprinted on his upper chest like a prison ID number, a running time code and the date of the recording had been superimposed. It appeared to have been made three weeks earlier, in fact on the very day I had departed Australia.

  But what shocked me was my father’s appearance. I pressed the pause button immediately to take a closer look at him.

  I recognized the features of the person on screen as my father’s, of course, but they were gray and washed out; his eyes were drawn and without any of their usual curiosity. His face was quite immobile, so different from his usually animated expression.

  After several moments I pressed the play button and my father’s image came to life again.

  He stared directly into the camera. Suddenly from offscreen a man’s voice addressed him. “Would you state your full name, please?” The voice had a northern European accent, clipped and precise, and was politely solicitous.

  My father’s head turned toward it. “Alex Kurzem,” he mumbled in response.

  I sat on my futon, spellbound, as my father repeated the story of his wartime childhood to what was apparently a Jewish Holocaust organization. Only this time he did not speak in any great detail, as he had with me in Melbourne. Rather he skimmed across incidents as the interviewer, unnamed and unseen, tried to get a broad picture of what had happened to my father. My father answered the interviewer’s questions as best he could, but the harsh lighting and unforgiving angle of the camera, positioned slightly above him and off to the left, seemed to have made him shy. The scene had none of the intimacy afforded him by the darkened kitchen at home. It was a disconcerting experience for me to observe my father clinically, in this mediated format, rather than sit close to him at home.

  At one point the voice of an unidentified woman with a heavy northern European accent joined the interview. When my father mentioned Commander Lobe as a person who took an extraordinary and somewhat sinister interest in creating his identity as a mascot, she came to life. I shifted my position onto the tatami floor closer to the television so that I could hear their exchange more clearly.

  She was shocked that my father had been acquainted with the commander and seemed to know a great deal about his wartime activities. She spoke of Lobe’s reputation as a war criminal: according to many historians, he was responsible for the murder of tens of thousands of Jews. She told my father that he had unwittingly kept company with the highest echelons of the Latvian Nazi elite. Even though my father must’ve been aware of Lobe’s wartime actions, he appeared genuinely horrified by this the extent of these revelations, so much so that he was left speechless for several moments.

  Even this brief reference to the commander suggested that there was still much more not only to him, but to the other men who had controlled my father’s life. While there was little I could do in Tokyo, I resolved to move forward in my investigations once I was back in Oxford.

  Shortly after that the interview came to a close. An instant before the camera was turned off I caught a final glimpse of my father rising from his chair and noticed that he had been nursing his case the whole time. Then the screen turned to static.

  I looked at my watch. It was after 11:00 p.m. I’d been watching the tape for almost two hours. I calculated that it must have been midnight in Melbourne. I considered calling my father, who was likely awake with insomnia, but not wanting to rouse and alarm my mother, I decided to wait until the next morning.

  The usual drop in temperature overnight—a welcome relief in a Tokyo summer—had not come, and there didn’t seem to be much point in trying to sleep. Instead I prepared some strong black coffee and opened the window.

  I was anxious to call my father, even though I was unsure how to broach the topic of the tape with him. He’d told me that he didn’t feel particularly Jewish. Why had he given his testimony to a Jewish Holocaust organization? He’d clearly been hoping for information they might have about Koidanov and Panok, but they hadn’t heard of these words. Or was there a deeper purpose to his visit? Was he looking to know more about his Jewishness? If so, there were no answers in the tape, which focused mainly on his time with the Latvians. Was he simply hoping to find a community who shared his earliest history? Or was he searching for some sort of absolution from these people simply because they were Jewish? It was impossible to know.

  It was now 7:00 a.m. I dialed my parents’ number and almost immediately my father answered. If I’d imagined that he’d want to discuss his past, I couldn’t have been more wrong. I was pleased to hear him in high spirits: I imagined that the pressure of the horrific memories that had been building up inside him for more than five decades was for the moment alleviated. Perhaps he even felt safe. I couldn’t help but wonder how long this Indian summer would last.

  He told me excitedly about a trip he was planning with
my mother. They were going to drive from Melbourne to Rockhampton, in the subtropical north of Australia, to visit some old friends who had retired there. I could picture them as they sped silently across the dry, inhospitable terrain. They had grown so comfortable with each other in more than forty years of marriage and seemed often to communicate almost by telepathy.

  “Then,” my father said, waking me from my thoughts, “your mum and I will continue along Highway One, all the way to Rockie.” He used the shorthand commonplace among Australians, “Rockie” or “The Rock,” as I had also heard Rockhampton called.

  “You should drop in and see Ilse,” I suggested. Ilse was Mirdza’s only daughter. She lived just north of Brisbane on Queensland’s coast. I hoped that the mention of Ilse would provide a pretext for discussing the videotape.

  But my father shut this down. “No,” he said, “can’t see Ilse this time. Have to get to Dirk’s as quickly as possible.”

  “What’s the rush?” I asked.

  “No rush,” he replied. “I just don’t want to dally-dilly.”

  “You mean dilly-dally, Dad,” I corrected him and again made ready to ask him about the tape.

  I should have known better. My father had finely tuned antennae and must have sensed what was coming. He seized the opportunity provided by his linguistic blunder.

  “Why not dally-dilly?” he said, exaggerating his Russian accent to dramatize the fact that English was not his native tongue. “It sounds as good as dilly-dally. Even dilly-dilly sounds good. Dally-dally does, too, for that matter.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh. My father knew how to disarm me. But it was also a laugh of nervous relief: I had resurfaced to a familiar reality. To hear him be as quick-witted as usual reassured me that he was fine, even if he was keeping the demons at bay.

  In the weeks that followed I made regular telephone calls to Melbourne but never successfully broached the subject of the videotape with my father. Whenever he answered the phone and heard my voice, he would tell me that he could speak for only a moment, that he was busy.

  “Too busy to speak with your son?” I responded testily on more than one occasion. But he would brush aside my accusation and tell me that he was doing a favor for a neighbor, or collecting spare parts for his beloved VCRs and broken televisions, or even, preposterously, feeding his cat, Princess, who couldn’t be kept waiting. Then he would hand the phone over to my mother.

  Eventually I became vexed. Why on earth had he chosen to speak of his past and then been so reluctant to discuss it further?

  As the weeks passed, I lost the urge to socialize with friends and colleagues in Tokyo. Perhaps as a way of filling my father’s silence, I became increasingly preoccupied with the contents of the videotape. In truth, I had time for little else.

  I would play the tape repeatedly and pause at moments that struck me as somehow critical to his story. I found I was able to observe my father in a way I would never have been able to do in real life. I became an expert at decoding his body language and facial expressions, so that eventually the image on the screen became more real to me than my father himself. I clung to his words, too, and jotted them down in a notebook I’d begun in Melbourne. It was a macabre obsession. If anybody had called upon me to recite the words on the tape, I am convinced that I would have been able to parrot them without difficulty.

  Then one night, while I was replaying the video, the nightmarish spell was broken unexpectedly. Though I would have been incapable of making such a gesture in real life, I reached out to the image of my father on the screen and, as if it would allay his troubles, touched his cheek.

  Two floors below my manshon tremors began deep below the earth’s crust, and it seemed that Tokyo was still waiting to see if the vibrations aboveground would end in a jolt or develop into something much more terrible. My own foundations were already irretrievably shaken. My center of gravity was shifting.

  I decided it was time to make the journey back to Oxford.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CAST ADRIFT

  My flight was the last in a long queue waiting at Narita airport on the outskirts of Tokyo. I closed the shade and curled up in my seat, covering myself in a blanket. Almost immediately I began to feel anxious, as if everything I had gone through in Tokyo had been lying in wait.

  I wanted to know more about the triumvirate of men—Commander Lobe, Jekabs Dzenis, and Sergeant Kulis—who had played a critical role in my father’s fate during the war years, and whose influence had extended into his new life in Australia. The shadow that loomed most heavily over me at that moment was that of Commander Lobe. I’d grown up believing him to be a kind and heroic person who had figured strongly in what I now knew to be the false version of my father’s rescue. The female interviewer on the tape had stated with absolute certainty that Lobe had been not only a high-ranking Latvian Nazi but also a war criminal notorious for his cruelty. He had never been punished for his crimes. She had made particular mention of two mass exterminations at places called Slonim and Rumbula. I had never heard of them, and, of course, my father had made no mention of either of these locations, or exterminations of any kind, in his fictionalized version of life with Lobe.

  It was still not clear to me why my father hadn’t come clean about Commander Lobe after the war had ended, when he was free to do so. Why had my father maintained the fiction that he was a pigherd boy discovered by soldiers? I wondered whether the intimidation my father had suffered in Australia had been more pervasive than he’d suggested. Clearly, there was much more to discover.

  I had, in fact, gone in search of Lobe in Stockholm, in the early 1980s, to thank him for his kindness to my father. From London, I’d excitedly phoned my father in Melbourne to tell him of my plan. He’d been hesitant rather than pleased, claiming that I’d disrupt the peaceful life of an elderly couple who did not enjoy good health. As I continued to express my determination to visit the Lobes, he protested more vehemently against my plan. I chose to ignore what I saw as an irrational objection.

  It was my first visit to northern Europe in the winter.

  Stockholm was blanketed in snow and, even though it was the middle of the day, it was almost pitch-dark on the streets. As a student, I didn’t have much money, but I managed to find a room in a fleabag hotel near the main station. That first night I had to sleep in my overcoat, and when I woke in the morning, my blankets had a thin layer of ice on them.

  When I left the hotel the next morning, I found a public telephone in the park opposite. I dialed Lobe’s number, but there was no reply. During that day, in between sightseeing, I must have dialed the number at least a dozen times.

  The following morning I tried again, but again nobody picked up. I wondered if Lobe had moved or, even worse, recently died. I was very disappointed because I wanted to express my gratitude to the hero who’d rescued my father from the terrors of the forest. Therefore, I resolved to make my way to Lobe’s address on the off chance that he might still be there.

  I got directions from the receptionist at the hotel and boarded a tram that would take me directly to the suburb known as Handen, where he lived. I got off the tram and headed in the direction of what turned out to be public housing.

  I located Lobe’s building and finally found my way to the right floor in a dingy, barely lit elevator. The smell of human urine in the rear corner was so overpowering that I had to cover my nose and mouth with my hand.

  I knocked on the front door of what I thought was the right apartment. There was no answer. I waited several moments and then knocked again, more loudly.

  There was still no answer, but this time I was convinced that I’d heard a shuffling sound inside. I placed my ear to the door and just at that moment it sprang open violently, still on its chain. I got the shock of my life. Through the gap I could see part of an elderly man’s face. His rheumy eye examined me.

  “Yes?” he asked me in Swedish.

  “Herr Lobe?” I replied in German.

  At fir
st he didn’t answer me. His one eye continued to evaluate me. Then he spoke. “What do you want?” he asked me in perfect, formal German.

  “You are Mr. Lobe, aren’t you?” I asked.

  “Who are you?” he said.

  “I am Mark, the son of Uldis Kurzemnieks,” I replied, using my father’s Latvian name. I’d expected the expression in his eye to change upon hearing this, and for him to welcome me with open arms.

  Instead the eye looked startled and darted about. “Go away!” he hissed.

  I was greatly shocked.

  “Sir,” I said. “You remember Uldis Kurzemnieks, don’t you?”

  “I told you, go away from here.” He spat out the words.

  “The little corporal!” I pleaded with him. “Remember?”

  “Go away or I will call the police!” he warned me. Then he slammed the door shut in my face.

  I was completely mystified by his attitude. “Surely he couldn’t have forgotten,” I thought. I rapped loudly on the door, calling out “Commander Lobe” and pleading with him to open up, when suddenly, still on its chain, the door flew open again. The long blade of a carving knife came violently through the opening, waving about.

  I jumped backward. Without uttering a word, Lobe continued to brandish the knife. I backed farther away, totally bewildered.

  Why hadn’t the mention of my father’s name allayed his fears? I wondered. Was he sick? Suffering from some sort of dementia? I could only conjecture. I left.

  As I boarded the elevator, I was shaking from head to toe. When it stopped during its descent and the doors opened to two elderly women, they took an abrupt step backward, eyeing me suspiciously: I must have looked shattered. One of them waved her hand at me, indicating that they’d wait for the next ride.

  I hurried out of the building without looking back. There was nothing else to do but return to the hotel. And on the way back I hatched a plan.